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The Age of Incumbency

You read POLITICO. You’ve seen the polls—Congress is about as popular as root canals, taxes and North Korea. You’ve probably followed the stories about the “civil war” between the Republican establishment and the Tea Party, heard about all the shadowy groups pouring money into races across the country. You were stunned when Eric Cantor, the ultimate Capitol Hill insider, was bounced out of office by a no-name economics professor—but nodded as pundit after pundit warned of a coming anti-incumbent wave.

Well, smartypants, riddle me this: If Congress is so unpopular, why do so many incumbents keep getting re-nominated and re-elected?

As we reach the end of another primary season, it’s an important question to ask. With just nine state primaries to go this year (depending on whether you count Louisiana’s unusual Nov. 4 primary), incumbents are absolutely killing it. House incumbents are 332 for 335 in their bids for re-nomination, and Senate incumbents are a perfect 22 for 22, with a race yet to be completed in Hawaii. That’s well within the historical norm, and this might actually end up being an above-average year for incumbents.

For the number of Senate incumbent losses to match the post-World War II average, only one incumbent has to lose this year. But it appears that none will, especially now that Sen. Brian Schatz, the appointed Hawaii Democrat, officially won renomination Friday night in a race that went into a storm-delayed overtime. In the House, three incumbents have lost—the nonagenarian Ralph Hall, reindeer farmer Kerry Bentivolio and Cantor—and to match the postwar average in non-redistricting years, two more would have to lose. That’s possible, although it’s hard to point to any single district where the incumbent isn’t currently a big favorite in the remaining primaries.

It just goes to show: In politics, as in life, the surer bet is on stability rather than change.

This comes despite ominous signs for members of Congress. Congress has been dreadfully unpopular for years, recently registering approval ratings in the teens, though it’s not unusual for Congress to be unpopular: Gallup surveys going back to the 1970s only find a relative handful of periods where approval was over 50 percent. What’s more interesting is that these surveys are picking up voters who don’t just dislike the institution—they also dislike their own incumbent. For instance, the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 51 percent of Americans disapprove of their own member of Congress, the first time the disapproval number was over 50 percent in that poll.

While incumbents aren’t losing at any significant rate, their performance isn’t quite as sterling as it has been in the past. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight recently pointed out that the average performance for GOP senators in their primaries was 73 percent this year, down from an average of 89 percent from 2004-2008. Scott Bland, editor of National Journal’s Hotline, found a similar dynamic in the House.

A visceral suspicion of career politicians is a part of the American political DNA that stretches back to the founding. A key legend of the birth of the United States holds that George Washington, our American Cincinnatus, decided not once, but twice, to voluntarily leave his position when a lesser man could have assumed absolute power (he resigned his commission at the end of the Revolution and then left office after two elected terms as president). We don’t like kings or feudal lords. Ideally, American leaders are supposed to be citizens first whose time in government is measured in years, not decades. This sentiment shows up in our modern campaigns: The accusation that a politician has “gone Washington” is so common as to be cliché.

Americans struggle to enforce these lofty ideals on their actual officeholders, however. Incumbent addicts, they sometimes feel compelled to take away their own freedom—like an overeater nailing shut the cookie jar—to keep themselves from pulling the lever for the same lawmakers over and over again.

In the 1990s, Americans in many states enacted term limits for their state legislators in an attempt to curtail entrenched power (the practical effect may have just been to empower the lobbyists who grew to understand state government better than the green legislators, but that’s an argument for another day). In 1995, the Supreme Court ruled that such term limits could not be applied to a state’s members of Congress. Still, support for the idea remains high: 75 percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup last year backed term limits for members of Congress. Such a change would require a constitutional amendment—in other words, it’s not going to happen.

So Americans end up electing the same people time after time in many states and districts, even if some part of them tells them not to. This dynamic is clear not only in Congress, but also at the state level: In fact, two long-serving governors up for reelection this year illustrate it vividly.

Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political newsletter produced by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He also directs the center’s Washington, D.C., office.